An AI visibility audit answers three questions with evidence: does AI cite your business when buyers ask, who gets cited instead, and which of four causes keeps you out. A real audit runs your actual buyer questions through the major AI platforms multiple times, logs every citation, and ends in a prioritized fix list. Anything less is a dashboard screenshot with an invoice.
Why this category suddenly exists
AI search visits grew 42.8% year over year to 27.4 billion in Q1 2026, while Google search grew 2.4%. AI search visitors convert at roughly 4.4 times the value of average organic visitors. Against that, 73% of brands hold zero visibility in AI answers. The money moved to a channel most businesses cannot see, which is the whole reason this audit category appeared.
Your three options, priced
| Option | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free graders (HubSpot AEO Grader) | $0 | A surface score, silent on causes |
| Monitoring tools (Scrunch, Otterly, Profound) | $250 to $500+ per month ($337/mo category average) | Dashboards that need interpreting |
| Done-for-you audits (independent studios) | $300 to $1,500 one-time | Diagnosis plus a fix list, quality varies |
Ours costs $397, takes 5 working days, and ships an 18-page report with a Loom walkthrough. That lands under two months of average monitoring tooling, and it ends in a plan rather than a dashboard.
What a real audit must contain
The query battery, run multiple times. AI answers vary between runs, so a single-run audit reports noise. Ours runs 50 buyer questions across 6 platforms.
The competitor citation map. Every domain cited for your buyer queries, ranked by frequency, so you can see who owns your category in the answers.
The four-cause diagnosis per gap. Crawl access, index coverage, answer extractability, authority deficit. The first two account for most misses: businesses block AI crawlers with security defaults and never opened Bing Webmaster Tools.
The ranked 90-day plan. Every fix sized by effort and impact, in order, so you know what to do on Monday.
The test that exposes a weak vendor
Ask them to show their own AI citations. A vendor who sells citations and cannot produce their own logged queries is selling a theory.
Audit first or fix first?
Audit first, even if you never hire anyone. The audit tells you which of the four causes applies to you, and the fixes differ by cause. A vendor pitching a retainer without running your queries is quoting blind.
Run yours
The $397 audit runs 50 buyer questions across 6 AI platforms and ends in the ranked plan. The free 48-hour scan is the short version.